On Dec 11, 2007 5:53 AM, Cary Bass cbass@wikimedia.org wrote:
SJ Klein wrote:
On Mon, 10 Dec 2007, Cary Bass wrote:
We held the last bidding meeting at 15:00 UTC, which seemed to work for almost everyone in the world. I think it would suck for Alaska, Hawaii and Fiji--but the rest...
It's not so hot for Australia; nor even for Japan & San Francisco. SJ
Not so hot but manageable for all of them. Yes, it's early for San Francisco...we'll have to learn to wake up real early :)
I am relaxed in this issue - could we find multiple slots we want to try possibly? How about blackout/grayout hour time table on wiki and then find to preferred schedule as many as possible?
For example, I'm not sure a 2 hour meeting which begins at 1am (for some Australians in +1000, 15 UTC is 1am iirc) is always manageable. In the late hours, one hour difference affects your condition greatly. When I organize a meeting with my European/US Wikimedia colleagues, I prefer to start it at 1400 UTC (23 in Tokyo, 16 or 15 in Rome). 0700 UTC worked too (16 in Tokyo, 9 or 8 in Rome). That is why I suggest there may be multiple options.
I agree with Anthere - our past success has come from our diversity - the fact we are a global team. In this very reason I think the convenience of Alex team - at least of core members of Alex team are worthy to consider in scheduling, specially none of them have been members of the past teams. They need to be integrated into the team - there should be one team, not two divided teams "local" and "global". A team needs to have a core, and we have Mido of Alexandria as our lead organizer this year. It would benefit the team as a whole to have him involved into spheres as long as he wants: let him decide what he would like to observe first and then what he would like to delegate other volunteers.
Besides that, as Eia mentioned, it is very important for most of us volunteers to have it out of office working hours. So it is worthy to consider to have it in the weekend as default. I am aware it would be a pain for WMF staff, to have a meeting out of their usual office hours, but it would be easier to manage than all other volunteers negotiate their bosses to spare two hours during working hours, and WMF may find wisely compensations for its employees <g>.